Starts off strong then goes downhill once things start to blow up

Rating: 5/10 (24 September 2005)

The Island is almost like two separate movies. It starts off as a very interesting sci-fi flick with a really interesting premise: there's a futuristic society, a global plague, an island paradise, and a sense that something isn't right. The director painstakingly builds the tension and the sense of unease until Ewan MacGregor's character finally discovers the truth.
Shortly after that, all those sci-fi ideas are abandoned and the film degenerates into an all-out action flick where the story is largely irrelevant. There's nothing wrong with action, but this is truly dumbed-down, outlandish stuff. In one scene, our two main characters fall forty stories or so out of a tall building and then get up and walk away. Then there's another completely ludicrous scene in which the man sent to hunt our heroes is faced with two identical Ewan MacGregors and he must decide which one to kill. I'm still not sure what he based his decision on.
This movie could have been a lot better if they hadn't dumbed it down so much in the second half. There were some great possibilities and some really interesting ideas that were abandoned. One example I'm thinking of is the notion that clones will eventually begin to obtain the memories of the people they were cloned from. They throw this idea out there as an important plot point and then never mention it again.